Sunday, March 18, 2012

Sunday Salon: Low Country Love

 A happy Sunday to you all!  I can't even tell you much about last week because I had one eyeball focused on Friday, when we were scheduled to drive up to South Carolina.  A little housecleaning, a couple of volleyball games, a few workouts, and whatever.  But we hit the road by 6am Friday and were in Kiawah Island by 1pm.  By 1:30pm, we had thrown our bags in our room at a resort called The Sanctuary (check this out) and had rented bicycles.  We decided last November in St. George how much we love exploring places on bikes, so this is what we did for nearly two straight days.  This place is covered with bike paths.  That and a few hundred 10 million dollar homes.  Hubby and I also squeezed in 18 holes one morning as well, where gators roamed freely and in one instance, stood over one of my balls, refusing to let me have it.  


A little after lunch today we will head up to Charleston for a conference.  While hubby is in meetings, the kids and I are going to visit a plantation, catch a carriage ride tour through historical Charleston, and do some shopping.  Will I eat shrimp and grits?  It's tempting.  I may need to splurge.  They just don't make shrimp and grits anywhere else like they do in the Low country.


I did a little bit of reading this week, despite my distraction.  I finished John Hart's "The Last Child" on audio, which was excellent.  I had a few issues with some of the pronunciations of certain words...just weird little quirks that drove me nuts.  This story is set in North Carolina, but some of the words sounded distinctly Canadian.  I'm going to have to chat with Kathy some to make sure.  Then I started Anna Quindlen's "Every Last One" which is narrated by the amazing Hope Davis (who also narrated "State of Wonder").  All I know is that "something bad happens" but I haven't gotten to that part yet.  Yet I am constantly analyzing who I think is going to get the boot.  It makes me tense.  


In print, I took a little detour.  I have a whole stack of things that need reading, but I found myself at the mall with my daughter last Sunday, stuck sitting and waiting, and waiting and infernally waiting.  So I pulled up the Kindle on my phone and started "Bad Marie".  I blew through that one pretty quickly - I liked it!  I also read Alma Katsu's short story that supplements "The Taker", called "The Devil's Scribe".  I'm now about a third of the way through "The Odds" by Stewart O' Nan.  He is a great writer, but boy his stories make me so forlorn.  


So has anyone heard if there is going to be a Spring Dewey's Readathon?  My brain starts to stir when it is That Time, and I didn't see anything on the website.  I have a hankering.  I'm thinking John Green.


I haven't been doing much commenting lately.  I promise soon I will be back in my groove.  Also, something really wacky has been going on with Wordpress blogs.  No matter what I do, even logging into Wordpress, I cannot leave a comment.  It is maddening.  I hope they fix this soon.


Hope all of you have a great Sunday.  Reading anything I can't miss?


    

16 comments:

rhapsodyinbooks said...

Ah, here in Tucson we occasionally have rattlers that guard golf balls. Gators wouldn't be any fun either! On the other hand, up north one has to tiptoe through the goose stuff on golf courses. Always something!

So what I've found with wordpress is that if you can persevere to try about 5 times, you can get through with a comment, and THEN after that it lets you comment the first time. It's all very maddening.

Jenny said...

Oh no... that gator would have terrified me!!
I just finished reading The Odds recently and I found it different... but definitely forlorn. The characters sort of annoyed me in that one.
As for wordpress, me too!! Actually, it won't let me comment using the e-mail I usually do but I have a gmail address so I used that one and then it was fine. But it doesn't realize it's me because the picture that I usually have with my comments isn't there. Weird!

Julie P. said...

Enjoy your mini-vacation! Hope you get a lot of reading done.

And as far as gators near a golf ball go, it would only take one for me never to golf again.

bermudaonion said...

The Sanctuary sounds fabulous!! Carl has had encounters with gators on golf courses in Hilton Head so I've heard those stories before.

I know what you mean about accents. I'm listening to Fallen and the Southern accents are so off that they are distracting me.

Wordpress has made a change. If you try to comment with an email address that is associated with a WP or gravatar account, you must be signed in to comment. You should be able to comment with an email address that is not associated with either of those or with Twitter or Facebook.

Deb Nance at Readerbuzz said...

I haven't heard anything about a spring readathon, either. I was thinking about that a few days ago, too....


Here's my
Sunday Salon: Spring Break...in the Amazon?
I'd love to have you stop by!

Anonymous said...

Ahhh, grits. My dad loved them, but he ate them plain with salt and tons of butter. I used to tell him that grits were just a conduit for butter.

Have fun in Charleston!

Amy said...

I was wondering about the readathon as well.

Unknown said...

Things have died down a bit in my own life, so I'm back to blogging and commenting again. I did notice the problems with Wordpress today. Once I logged in to Wordpress, I was able to leave comments.

I never seem to make be able to join the Read-a-thons, but I hope they'll keep going. There were fun to watch, so they must have been fun to do.

Alyce said...

I have been very frustrated with wordpress too. I went into my old wordpress account and changed it to a different email address so that I could use the one I want to in order to comment, but it still says that it is associated with an account (even though it's not any more). I'm hoping that eventually it will update everywhere so that it knows that the email isn't associated with a WP account anymore. In the meantime I've been logging into Twitter to comment. It's all be driving me insane.

The golf thing with the gator made me think of Happy Gilmore. :)

Jenners said...

You are not alone in being annoyed by Wordpress!! I'm having the same problem.

Your vacation sounds wonderful. I say splurge for the shrimp and grits. You'll work it off on the bike.

I'll be curious to see what you think of The Odds. I listened to it and it was good but then BAM -- it ends. I was a bit taken aback by the abruptness.

Anyway, have so much fun on vacation.

Heidenkind said...

The Readathon will be April 19th. They just put out the call for volunteers yesterday I think.

Unknown said...

Your weekend sounds fantastic! I love cycling holidays, but we haven't done it for ages as my boys were too young. This weekend we managed to take the stabilisers off my youngest son's bike so hopefully it won't be long before we can enjoy it again.

have a wonderful week!

Zibilee said...

Oh wow, it does sound like you are having a great time! I bet the shrimp and grits are just as wonderful as I remember them, and as for that gator, well, I think I would have just let him keep that ball!

I have also been having issues with wordpress, so it's not just you, and judging from the comments, it seems like this is a widespread problem. I just changed the email address that I was using, and everything was fine.

Hope that you continue to have an amazing time and I will see you soon!

caite said...

I have serious, serious trip envy!

Ti said...

Grits are seriously yummy in my book.

I haven't heard about the read-a-thon yet for Spring.

I bookmarked that resort. You go to the best places. You need to start a travel blog. You know, in your spare time.

Kathleen said...

I hope you enjoyed your trip. It sounds like it was lovely. I've had trouble with Wordpress too. It finally started working again for me yesterday so hopefully it is fixed for you too.